Fortescue fights for secrecy over emails linked to Andrew Forrest and claims against Bart Kolodziejczyk

Fortescue wants to permanently suppress parts of emails linked to executive chairman Andrew Forrest and used to win orders to search the homes of former employees.

Despite backing away from attempts to broadly suppress its hotly-contested evidence, Fortescue wants to hide parts of emails from late 2020 and early 2021 outlining efforts to develop green iron ore processing technology.

Fortescue tendered those emails to the Federal Court in May and referred to them when gaining search orders against former Fortescue Future Industries scientists Bart Kolodziejczyk and Bjorn Winther-Jensen and their rival new venture Element Zero.

A new Fortescue secrecy application, published this week by the Federal Court, includes an email address for Mr Forrest that was included in tendered emails sent from December 15 to December 22, 2020.

Fortescue wants to suppress part of the tendered December 22 email, starting with the words “we have told Andrew” and outlining what its lawyers describe as potential locations for “trials”.

Fortescue is also trying to suppress what is written after the words “he is asking” on the previous page of this December 22 exhibit.

It wants to suppress the subject lines of the December 15 email exhibit and a paragraph that has been given any public description.

Fortescue used the alleged details of work outlined in the tendered emails to claim there was a suspicious lack of records on the company’s computer systems when Dr Kolodziejczyk and Dr Bjorn-Winther quit in late 2021.

Fortescue’s secrecy applications are due to be heard in Sydney on Thursday.

This will be a warm-up bout for a legal showdown with Dr Kolodziejczyk and Bjorn Winther-Jensen and Mr Forrest’s former close associate Michael Masterman, who is chief executive of Element Zero.

The Element Zero players are challenging controversial orders gained by Fortescue in mid-May after their former employer argued there was “industrial scale misuse” of its technology.

Summing up the challenges to the search orders in late May, Justice John Logan said the Element Zero team was alleging an “industrial scale forensic debacle”.

Fortescue asked early last month for sweeping secrecy orders that included the reports of private investigators who had kept watch on the scientists and their families, and much of the evidence underpinning this alleged forensic debacle.

But Fortescue decided to narrow the scope of that application after Justice Brigitte Markovic on July 10 described aspects of the secrecy push as an “ambit claim”.

It argues the suppression of Dr Forrest’s email address is for safety purposes.

The legal basis for most of the other secrecy pushes is not known — beyond Fortescue claiming “prejudice to the administration of justice”.